How To Make Money With Storage Auctions – Even Paper Collectibles Can Yield Nice Profits

A lot of people buy storage units at auction and often don’t realize how many items in the storage unit could potentially be collectible.

So I’d like to share a true story of one of the storage units that I bought.

We bought a storage unit several years ago and some of the paper items that were in the unit were just sort of set aside and never really put up on eBay. They were never really researched or sold.

That’s because we had so much stuff that we made money on with that storage unit (we made more than $4,400 on that unit) and we never really thought about these extra little paper items that were in the unit.

So, one of the paper items that came from that unit included a ticket to the 1967 rose bowl game. (it’s a football game that’s held every year on New Year’s Day)

So I thought, “Wow, this is interesting.” So I went ahead and put this ticket up and I thought: “I’ll just list it on eBay and see what happens”.

So I listed it and for most of the week it sat at about $30 and I was thinking, “Wow, that’s pretty good.” That’s 30 dollars that I didn’t know I had, just lying around in the garage!

So at the very end, I didn’t think very much about it. I didn’t even look at or track the auction until after the auction had closed.

Well, when the auction had closed, I came back and checked my eBay listings and I realized that ticket had sold for $180 and some change and I was just blown away!

Now, I had no idea why this ticket sold for $180, so I actually emailed the winning bidder after he had paid (and he paid right away) and I asked him “Hey, can you tell me why this ticket sold for so much?” And he said, “Oh, no reason. I was just at that game (in 1967) and I wanted a souvenir of the game that I attended.”

So that got me excited and I found these other Rose Bowl tickets that had come from the same storage unit and decided to list them, as well. (these other tickets were from different years. (from the late ‘70s to the late ‘80s)

Now, these tickets were a little different. The ticket that had sold for $180 was a complete and unused ticket, in great condition. The other tickets that I had lying around, (I had five of them) these were used tickets that had the stub cut off and they were also laminated, which is a big no – no. That just takes a lot off of the value. But again, these were laminated, so I thought: “Let me just put these up, one-by-oneand see how much they sell for”.

Each of those 5 tickets sold for $9.49. So, altogether, if you take the $180 plus about $50 total for the other 5 tickets, that’s $230 worth of just these paper items that I had never even thought of as being collectible or having a lot of value!

Originally, I had paid $375 for that storage unit, so about ¾ of the money that I paid for that unit was made back in just these little paper items that I had long since forgotten about. (this $230 just added to the $4,400 I had already made on that unit years ago!)

So the lesson of this success story is to always research every item that may or may not be collectible.

Because you just never know the kind of people that are out there who collect these – like sports memorabilia or other items. You just never know when something is going to be collectible and will be worth $180!

It’s funny to think that I’ve had $180 just sitting in my garage for years, from this one storage auction that we bought and just made our money and we moved on. As it turned out, we had an extra $230 just sitting there, until we went ahead and put them up on eBay!

So when I see some of these guys on the storage auction shows throwing boxes out and manhandling stuff, I have to laugh because you never know, there may be paper items in there that could be very collectible.